Met Office says more gales may be coming

Friday 9 December 2011

SCOTS face disruption to their travel plans in the run-up to Christmas after forecasters warned the country has not seen the last of yesterday's storms.

troubled waters: The Clyde was whipped up into a sea of small waves by yesterday's storm. breeze: (From left) Glasgow city centre shoppers and protesters in Kelvingrove get a buffeting; the Humanist Society's Ross Wright struggles at Holyrood; hail falls in Glasgow; and beachgoers defy gravity at Helensburgh (main image).

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Damien Henderson and Martin Williams

The gales, which packed wind speeds of 165mph at the top of the Cairngorm mountain range in the Highlands, came as Scotland suffered the worst winds in 25 years.

Now the Met Office is warning more low pressure areas could be heading from the Atlantic to Scotland over the coming weeks.

It said the previous highest recorded wind speed in the UK had been in 1986 when gusts of 173mph had been recorded, also in the Cairngorms. The Met's forecast for yesterday of "potentially damaging" raging winds came true hours after it issued a red alert, the strongest possible warning. Spokeswoman Helen Chivers said: "It's down to what could be described as an explosive, developing area of low pressure coming in from over the Atlantic. In the past 24 hours, that frontal system has developed into a massive storm which has been blown across the Atlantic by the jet stream." Paul Michaelwaite, director of Netweather, said more areas of low pressure being blown in from the Atlantic over the next weeks were possible. He said: "Over the next few weeks there is the risk of an increase in the frequency of deep low pressure systems crossing the Atlantic and moving close to, or over, the UK. The jet stream is pretty strong (running at around 150mph to 200mph) and mostly straight-lining across the Atlantic currently so low pressure systems will frequently spin up off and strengthen off of it," he said. "Although there's some uncertainty over the exact way next week and beyond will play out, there looks likely to be at least a couple more pretty vicious looking systems coming through during the next seven days, and no real sign of any let-up into the following week either." Ms Chivers said the storms did not appear to be evidence of global warming or changes in the UK weather systems. "It's just the general variability of the UK weather," she said. "People probably are more conscious of it as there haven't been a lot of storms in recent winters, which have seen more snowy, colder weather over the last two years. This is a return of the weather systems we would expect in more normal winters." The storms will have brought back memories for some people of the Great Storm of January 15, 1968, when more than 20 people died after hurricane-force winds gusting up to 140mph tore through central Scotland. It was the area's worst natural disaster since records began. In the early hours of Monday, Hurricane Low Q, which had been building in the Atlantic since the previous Friday, turned sharply east and funnelled its way up the Clyde estuary. Gusts hit the west of Scotland with such ferocity that it took several years to put the damage right. Glasgow bore the brunt of the destruction and deaths, with nine killed in the city and at least 100 people injured. So great was the scale of devastation that soldiers helped clear the streets of rubble. In the city, more than 300 homes were totally destroyed and around 70,000 were damaged, leaving nearly 2000 people homeless. Many householders were forced to live with makeshift tarpaulin roofs for a lengthy period. Last night, Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the Government had not over-reacted to yesterday's gales. She said: "There has been no over-reaction. When you have the Met Office telling you that they have got the highest warning covering the central belt of the country, and the police telling you there is a probability –which turned out to be the reality – of a no-travel warning, then I think it is incumbent on Government to react appropriately to that. "That's what we did. The decisions that have been taken have been right and appropriate."

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Met Office says more gales may be coming

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